Chapter 2

Crosby Kemper III is the director of the Kansas City Public Library and former CEO of UMB Financial Corporation. Educated at Yale, he has taught English at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China – and been a bookseller in Grand Central Station in New York City. He is the editor of, and contributor to, Winston Churchill: Resolution, Defiance, Magnanimity, Good Will, published by the University of Missouri Press.

In 2008, Kemper and the Library received the Gold Medal for Libraries from the Institute for Museum and Library Services presented at the White House by former first lady Laura Bush.

SYNOPSIS: Here is the famed fence whitewashing scene – among the most iconic in the novel, given artistic treatment by the likes of Thomas Hart Benton and Norman Rockwell. Chapter Two begins with Tom searching desperately for a way to get out of whitewashing the fence that Aunt Polly has tasked him with – and eventually he lands upon a scheme that makes him rich, at least in the boyhood currency of odds and ends.